AS400 Job Scheduler
If you are looking to create jobs that you need to run at specified days or times on a regular basis on your as400 then your need to be using a job control process or a job scheduler.
Your first port of call for this should be the job scheduler that is built into the operating system. The job scheduler that is built into the operating system is pretty good and will allow you to submit jobs at specified dates and times.
To access the built in job scheduler use the command Work With Job Schedule Entries, WRKJOBSCDE. Each job schedule entry contains the information needed to automatically submit a batch job once or at regularly scheduled intervals.
From the WRKJOBSCDE page you can maintain all the entries. You can also do an immediate submit of a scheduled job from here. You do have to be careful doing an immediate submit of a job though as if you setup your job in the default way, then immediate submits will use the current library list settings from your job. To prevent that you need to be sure to setup the job scheduled entries to take the setting from a specific *JOBD or a specific *USRPRF.
Although the built in job scheduler is very good, once you have been using it for a while you will come up against its limitations. One thing that it doesnt handle is any dependancies between jobs you want to run. For instance you may have a Close Of Business process or an overnight batch run that does you major updates and reporting, and have certain jobs that need to run before or after other jobs, but the built in job scheduler doesnt have anything that handles that. You can get round it by adding extra logic to your processes but of course that can be cumbersome and error prone to get right.
The other option is to look at more sophisticated job schedulers and there are a number out there.
IBM offer their own Advanced job scheduler for System I. It allows you to run jobs manually, based on a schedule or based on some event.
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/i/software/jscheduler/index.html
Helps system have their System I job scheduler ROBOT/Schedule which is also quite sophisticated.
http://www.helpsystems.com/pages/robot-schedule
Halcyons Operations Centre includes a job scheduler as well as other functions
http://www.halcyonsoftware.com/suites/operationscenter/index.html
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